Quote: Marshall Sahlins on relevance

I don't know about Britain, but in America many graduate students are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our "construction of the other."

So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no-one will pay the slightest attention to the work they're doing now. Maybe they're onto something.

John Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I work on the fossil and genetic record of human evolution (About me).

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